Christmas trees for children

Charitable auction held by Save the Children organisation raises 1 million euros.

Roxana Vasile, 13.12.2023, 14:00

A record sum of 1 million euros was raised at the
Festival of Christmas Trees auctioned on 8th December by the Save
the Children NGO. 22 trees were decorated by well-known Romanian artists and
designers. The money raised will be used to provide social and educational
support to vulnerable children at severe risk of poverty and social exclusion.

Organised in partnership with the National Museum of
Art of Romania, the auction was now in its 20th year. George Roman,
a programme director at Save the Children, tells us more:

The Festival of Christmas Trees has become a
fashionable charity among companies and entrepreneurs with sufficient resources
to be able to support programmes for children. At each edition, around 20-25
Christmas trees designed by famous designers are put up for auction. The trees
can then be admired for a week or more in the venues where the auction is held,
usually hotels, the Parliament Palace a few times, and in recent years at the
National Museum of Art of Romania. On gala night, the trees are put up for
auction by business people or representatives of companies we have already
worked with before or who wish to help the Save the Children Organisation run
its educational programmes for children.

George Roman also mentioned some of the VIPs who have
helped the organisation:

I’d like to start with Doina Levintza, an
extraordinary artist who every year since 2001 has designed for us some
extraordinary trees. The sum raised with her trees is probably the highest.
Many people from the world of sports have helped by taking part in the
auctions, such as Horia Tecău, Ilie Năstase, Ion Țiriac, Nadia Comăneci, who
took part in two or three editions, Gabriela Szabo and Simona Halep. TV stars
who have helped include Andreea Esca and Andreea Raicu, who have in fact been
hosting the auction for a few years, as well as Smiley and Cătălin and Andra
Măruță. In the first edition we benefited from the help of the British and
Swedish ambassadors.

The Christmas trees put up for auction are each one of
a kind. This year, the two most successful each raised 140,000 euros. More than
9 million euros have been raised through this event across all editions. Is
this a lot, or on the contrary, very little compared with what is needed?
George Roman:

Let’s say it’s a useful sum, for it allows us to
multiply our activities in many communities and we can only do this depending
on how much we collect every year. Some of the programmes we run and which
involve long-term intervention may require as much as 300-400,000 euros. The
results are extraordinary, for we are all aware of the quality of education
available in rural areas. A PISA survey published a few days ago shows a great
gap between the results of children made vulnerable by poverty and those living
in advantaged environments, a gap amounting to 3 school years. So our
programmes are targeted to these areas, because that’s where they are most
needed.

Thanks to the Festival of Christmas Trees, more than
200,000 children will be able to benefit from the Save the Children programmes.
George Roman explains:

Such examples are the educational programmes,
especially those referring to remedial education, intended to give a second
chance to children who have abandoned school a few years ago and who cannot be
easily reintegrated into the system without special classes; a programme called
School after School, which also provides a hot meal to children in many
communities. Almost 150,000 children who benefited from social and economic
support or programmes to prevent school drop-out were reintegrated into the
school system. We are also running programmes for pre-school children, called
the Summer Kindergarten, mainly in Romania’s poorest communities, where there
are no nursery schools and where the 2-3 months of classes before starting
school are crucial. Studies show that school drop-out in the first years of
school is precisely the result of the lack of training in the pre-school years and this is why the
Summer Kindergarten programmes are a priority for us, so far having been able
to provide assistance to 10,000 children in isolated villages in Romania.

Also, more than 100 school libraries were equipped
with tens of thousands of books, classrooms were renovated and refurbished,
tens of thousands of children received school supplies and their parents
received assistance, for it is almost impossible to design activities for the
school education of children without taking into account their families.

In Romania, the risk of poverty and social exclusion has
always been much higher in the rural areas compared with the urban areas. The
recent PISA report of the OECD underlines that without additional investment in
the areas struggling with structural poverty, the gaps will become even wider.
George Roman, a programme director for Save the Children, warns:

Let it be clear that we are the country with the
lowest investment in education and it is only through gradual increase in
investments that we can reach the European average. At the moment, Romania
invests 3-3.2% of its GDP in education, while the European average is around
5%. So there’s a lot of catching up to do for a school in the rural area to
look exactly like one in the urban environment. It’s the most decent thing a
government can do for Romanian children. No child should be doomed to poverty
and lack of good education because of where they are born!